This is a brief look at Helicon Focus for anyone who might be interested.
The Helicon Focus software application creates an image with enhanced depth of field by combining multiple images of the same subject, each with a slightly different plane of focus.
Or to quote the makers: "HeliconFocus is a program that creates one completely focused image from several partially focused images by combining the focused areas."
I downloaded the Windows version which has a 30 day free trial period and took it for a spin.
This evening I drove to a local nature reserve and took some photographs of a Clustered Bellflower. Normally I would photograph this at F16 to keep the flower in focus, but this would result in a messy background, which to my eye is rather ugly. So this time I used an aperture of F5.6 to creating a nice smooth out of focus background. I took four photos, the first focussed on the front of the flower, moving the plane of focus backwards a bit between each photograph.
Once I got back home I launched Helicon Focus, selected the four NEF files, and pressed the Run button. Five minutes later out popped the result, which I saved as a 16 bit TIFF file. Yes, it works in 16 bits! And yes it can work with Nikon RAW files without the need to use Nikon Capture. What's more, it seems to do an excellent job of RAW conversion, with accurate colours. So full marks to the makers.
I've attached two photos. The first image is the second one from the series, showing the flower photographed at F5.6. It has a nice smooth background, due to the large aperture, but very little of the flower is in focus. The second image is the combined image created by Helicon Focus. It also has a nice smooth background, but this time most of the flower is in focus. Looking at the original file at 100% I can see that I could have got better results by taking more photographs in the series. However, I think that HF has done an excellent job, and I look forward to using it on more interesting subjects, especially small insects.
I realise that this is a very brief test, but I hope it has given an indication of what it does. I hope to carry out more tests, to see if there are any serious shortcomings. If anyone else does there own tests, then please let me know what you think of it.
Here is the Helicon Focus web site:
http://www.heliconsoft.com/heliconfocus.html
The tool costs about £60 for the basic version, which seems more than reasonable to me.
Here are some alternative comments on the application:
http://www.gpmatthews.nildram.co.uk/.../scalesnf.html
http://www.hoothollow.com/Tip-July%2...iconFocus.html
Incidentally, the McDonalds are very respected professional nature photographers.